Suppose you had less that 100K in a bank. Would you bother to go stand in line to get your money? Isn't this a waste of time, since it is insured? I hear reports about the IndyMac bank run, but I don't see any of the press point out that most of these people in line (except for the few that needed t...

Apprentice_941 wrote: Regarding these last two bear markets - was it REALLY that hard to know them once they started? I remember with the dot com hoopla thinking - unless I can see the real life changes that these dot coms bring in the world around me, then it's a farce - and it was a farce. By all ...

retired at 48 wrote: Your list was not complete...how about this one: The world is in a grand experiment started in the 1970's when the last country, the USA, went off the gold standard. No country has any of its currency tied to something of value, like gold or silver. Gold has a value? What is the...

CaptMidnight said: about 6 months before the 2001 recession, the Bloomberg polls of bold-faced economists showed that they overwhelmingly missed the impending recession. Before the 2001 recession it was 50 of the top 50 economists didn't see a recession coming. However, at both points in time there...

CaptMidnight said: about 6 months before the 2001 recession, the Bloomberg polls of bold-faced economists showed that they overwhelmingly missed the impending recession. Before the 2001 recession it was 50 of the top 50 economists didn't see a recession coming. However, at both points in time there ...

VictoriaF makes a good case for using the limited FSA under certain circumstances. As I do not wear glasses and do not expect any extensive dental work, I don't think I'll use the FSA yet. I will however fully fund the HSA ($2550/yr max), but am still unclear whether it makes sense to then pay for ...

A lawyer is told my wife and her elderly mother that she could protect her Florida home from nursing home care costs. The lawyer said to contact her and do the paperwork quickly if the mother had to go into a nursing home. Mother was resistant to making the legal changes now, I don't know why, she d...

I am a particularly contrarian investor. The more Doom and Gloom messages I see, the higher the percentage of equities I pick for my asset allocation. Here you are, go all in!: "Merrill Lynch has warned that the United States could face a foreign "financing crisis" within months as the full consequ...

I'll probably get a lot of flak for this, but I think one can make the case for further significant market declines ahead. If you go to the Smithers and Co. website and look at the graph of log(q/qav) (where q is Tobin's q) you will see that every time it moves from a significantly overvalued state...

We can start with the price of oil. This may be a speculative bubble, it may not. There is tons of info available about it. No one needs to describe it to you, more information than you can possibly read exists. So, is the current oil price a bubble? I will arbitrarily define a bubble, for purpose ...

So-called bubbles are always identified after the fact, nobody has come up with a reliable method of predicting them. This is very true. Who could have predicted there would be a bubble in the Nasdaq prior to when it became obvious? Same with homebuilders. http://bespokeinvest.typepad.com/bespoke/i...

And how about the value babble that always comes with the bubble babble? People use to babble about the value of stocks, usually a number based some trailing-earnings crunch or other. But, I noticed that the oil bubble babblers segwayed right into oil value babble with nary a thought about the fact...

Tadamsmar said: Oil prices collapsed in 1999, but I don't remember any bubble babble back then. Yup. They also collapsed in 1985 (a bad time to be in Houston in the oil business), but nobody predicted the decline, or called in a bubble (either before or after the fact). And there was a collapse in ...

And how about the value babble that always comes with the bubble babble? People use to babble about the value of stocks, usually a number based some trailing-earnings crunch or other. But, I noticed that the oil bubble babblers segwayed right into oil value babble with nary a thought about the fact ...

See the term "oil bubble" here and then we now have a tread on the "next bubble". Is the word "bubble" just meaningless babble? What would cause a bubble babbler to say "Opps I was wrong, it was not a bubble." So-called bubbles are always identified after the fact, nobody has come up with a reliabl...

See the term "oil bubble" here and then we now have a tread on the "next bubble". Is the word "bubble" just meaningless babble? What would cause a bubble babbler to say "Opps I was wrong, it was not a bubble." So-called bubbles are always identified after the fact, nobody has come up with a reliable...

There is an organization called "OPEC" that does exactly that. Withhold production to drive the prices up. For some reason, they failed to accomplish their goals for about 25 years...and suddenly their actions seem to work. Something doesn't fit with that explanation. I guess withholding to drive u...

Are China stocks like the gas-guzzlers that are not worth what they were a few months ago? If distance is measured in money, then the shipping lanes had doubled and tripled in length. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/07/07/ccview107.xml Plus, China's manufacturing is relat...

If the expected price increase of oil is higher than what an oil field owner can earn at the bank in intrest, then some leave it in the ground. Inflation will impact the price of unharvested oil reserves. Also, the major US companies have been buying shares back for some time now. They are likely d...

You have a goal of creating additional regularity authority in the hopes of preventing oil prices from rising. I suspect this is misguided. It's not just the oil markets. Signs of unusual behavior abound across the commodities markets. Take cotton, for example. In late February, the price of cotton...

Do you have a guess or some knowledge of why financialengines seems to project G's return > F given that the 1988-present data does not seem to support that. Do they actually project higher returns for the G fund? That makes very little sense, as the F fund holds corporate and mortgage-backed bonds...

... more suppliers should be willing to flood the market to take advantage of temporary high prices. This doesn't seem to be happening. This pushing on a string. The OPEC ministers have all been saying that the market is well supplied. No buyers are being turned away. Surely there are unfullfilled ...

So 40/60 C+F was better than 50/50 C+G on both SD and return over 88 to 06 Given that, what's the argument for 100% G? The argument that David Grabiner has made to me in a couple threads (I think one of which I linked to) is that the period I used in the calculations was one of falling interest rat...

Many people on this board who invest in the TSP avoid the F fund because they believe that the F fund is not even on the efficient frontier of a TSP portfolio; the F fund gets higher returns than the G fund by taking credit and interest-rate risks which are correlated with the stock-market risk. (T...

If your question is how to use the G Fund, the default answer is to use it as the L Funds use it. May I remind you that the way the L Fund uses the G Fund is by calculating the efficient frontier? Now may I refer you back to the OP? And, may I refer you back to the title of the thread: Asset Alloca...

If your question is how to use the G Fund, the default answer is to use it as the L Funds use it. May I remind you that the way the L Fund uses the G Fund is by calculating the efficient frontier? Now may I refer you back to the OP? And, may I refer you back to the title of the thread: Asset Alloca...

You said: "TSP G seems similair to long term treasuries" Did you change your mind? No, I didn't - but Treasuries are not the same as Mortgages, Industiral and Agency debt or do you not understand the difference? Granted they don't behave precisely the same. But closer than the G I think. Both F and...

TSP G seems similair to long term treasuries - just displace whatever allocation you have towards that with G fund and keep whatever percent the portfolio you are tracking allocates to REITs in the vanguard fund Without even bothering to find out how good that approximation is? I'm willing to bet i...

I've always found false precision to be more ruinous than imprecise truth - the variance will be greater than the allocation itself so don't sweat it and approximate. Approximate based on what? TSP G seems similair to long term treasuries - just displace whatever allocation you have towards that wi...

I've always found false precision to be more ruinous than imprecise truth - the variance will be greater than the allocation itself so don't sweat it and approximate. Approximate based on what? TSP G seems similair to long term treasuries - just displace whatever allocation you have towards that wi...

I think that if you substitute the G Fund for a bond allocation, then you perhaps increase risk while decreasing returns relative to the original allocation. I am not sure. By risk, do you mean volatility? If so, would you elaborate on why TSP G increases volatility? You are basically putting a mon...

I think that if you substitute the G Fund for a bond allocation, then you perhaps increase risk while decreasing returns relative to the original allocation. I am not sure. The L Fund allocations are based on an efficient frontier calculation. I am thinking that the best way to incorporate the G Fu...

I'm not sure what it is you are asking. There is nothing inherently more efficient regarding the L Fund allocations than an allocation you could create on your own using your various accounts. Such an allocation could model itself on various proposed allocations: Malkiel, Swensen, Vanguard Target R...